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WASHINGTON Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has become the latest and biggest-name Republican to be appearing at next months Save America Summit hosted by the group that staged the Jan. 6 rally that fed into the attack on the Capitol.

Women for America First leader Amy Kremer announced Pauls appearance at the April 8-11 event she is hosting at former President Donald Trumps financially troubled property near the Miami airport. Hell be discussing his common sense #Electionintegrity plan to make sure Nov 2020 NEVER happens again, according to a post on the groups Twitter account.

Election integrity is the phrase many Republicans have been using to describe their efforts across dozens of states to impose new voting restrictions, typically based on the lie started by Trump that massive voter fraud had allowed Democrats to steal the election from him.

In fact, Trumps own attorney general at the time, William Barr, said there was no evidence of that, and Trumps own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency declared the Nov. 3 election the most secure in American history.

Pauls office did not respond to HuffPost queries about the event.

Other expected speakers include Republican House members Byron Donalds and Kat Cammack, of Florida, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia.

Cammacks and Greenes offices did not respond to HuffPost queries. A spokesman for Rep. Donalds said that he did not believe that Trump or anyone else at the Jan. 6 rally was responsible for inciting what happened at the Capitol shortly afterward.

Kremers Doral summit, which shares the same name as Trumps political committee and the Jan. 6 rally adjacent to the White House, coincides with a Republican National Committee donor retreat 75 miles to the north in Palm Beach. Trump is hosting his appearance at the RNC meeting at his own Mar-a-Lago country club. It is unclear whether he will be appearing at Kremers event at his golf resort in Doral.

Depending on how many people attend, Kremers event could put hundreds of thousands of dollars into the cash registers at the resort, which began suffering from the backlash to Trumps actions and words as president even before the arrival of the pandemic last year.

Chip Somodevilla via Getty ImagesSen. Rand Paul, right, gives a fist bump to then-President Donald Trump while praising the president during a campaign rally at Phoenix Goodyear Airport October 28, 2020, in Goodyear, Arizona.

Neither Kremer nor Women for America First responded to HuffPost questions about the upcoming summit.

She and her group were the main sponsor of the Save America rally where Trump urged attendees to march on the Capitol and intimidate then-Vice President Mike Pence and Congress into overturning the election he had lost by 7 million votes and nevertheless installing him for a second term.

Before Trump took the stage, Kremer was repeating the same lies that Trump had started spreading the night of the election, claiming that he had won and it had been stolen from him.

We know that there was voter fraud, we absolutely know it and thats why were here, to stop the steal, Kremer told the crowd gathered on the Ellipse. Were not going to let them steal an election. You guys, we cannot back down.

Not long afterward, thousands of Trump supporters broke through police barriers around the Capitol. Some 800 entered the building itself in an attempt to carry out Trumps demand that Congress stop the certification of Democrat Joe Biden as the winner. One police officer died in the aftermath, and 140 others were injured. Two officers died by suicide after the event.

How much, precisely, Kremers group spent on its various pro-Trump events or how much it will be spending at Trumps Doral golf course may not be known for years. Nor can it determined how much Kremer is paying herself. The group was registered as a nonprofit in Virginia on Feb. 6, 2019, but no annual tax returns are yet on file at the IRS website.

Kremer paid herself $306,268 from a handful of super PACs she helped run between 2010 and 2019, including the Tea Party Express and the pro-Trump Great America PAC, according to Federal Election Commission records. She paid her daughter, Kylie Kremer, who is also an officer in the Women for America First group and who also appeared at the Jan. 6 rally, an additional $11,250.

Kremer, however, stopped filing required reports for her latest super PAC, Women Vote Smart PAC, a year ago, according to FEC records. One former employee said on condition of anonymity that he and a handful of his colleagues were owed a total of about $16,000 by the committee but were never paid when she devoted her attention to her new nonprofit, Women for America First.

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Free, fair, and secure elections are the bedrock of a democracy. In the wake of the 2020 election, it has never been more apparent that significant work needs to be done to ensure Americans, regardless of party affiliation, have trust and confidence in our electoral process. We witnessed significant voting irregularities, last-minute changes, and numerous instances of officials setting aside state election law, amongst a host of other troubling patterns. While state legislatures are beginning to take action to reform vulnerabilities that currently exist, the U.S. Congress is trying to make a power grab to federalize elections and unconstitutionally impose unnecessary, dangerous and unwise mandates on the states. Join us for a timely and important discussion with Senator Rand Paul on states efforts on election reform and an update on H.R. 1: The For the People Act of 2021, that just passed the House and has a looming vote in the Senate.

>>>The Facts About H.R. 1: The For the People Act of 2021

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VIRTUAL EVENT: Safeguarding our Elections: A Conversation with Sen. Rand Paul - Heritage.org

(Reuters) - Britain is close to striking a vaccine deal with the European Union as soon as this weekend that will remove the threat of the bloc cutting off supplies, The Times reported on Saturday.

FILE PHOTO: A woman holds a small bottle labelled with a "Coronavirus COVID-19 Vaccine" sticker and a medical syringe in this illustration taken October 30, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo

Under the agreement the EU will remove its threat to ban the export of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines to Britain, it added.

In return, the British government will agree to forgo some long-term supplies of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that had been due to be exported from a factory in Holland run by AstraZenecas subcontractor Halix, the newspaper reported.

However, the EU has never threatened a ban on the export of vaccines, but has only said it could block on a case-by-case basis specific vaccine shipments to countries with higher vaccination rates or that do not export vaccines to the EU.

We are only at the start of discussions with the UK. There are no talks over the weekend, an EU Commission source said on Saturday, adding that sending vaccines produced at Halix was not part of the talks.

A second EU source had previously said that the EU has no intention of sharing with Britain the vaccine substance from Halix, which is estimated to have already produced enough for about 15-20 million doses, and can produce the equivalent of 5 million shots per month.

The British government, Pfizer-BioNTech, and AstraZeneca were not immediately available for comment.

The EUs rebuff follows Britains repeated refusal to share with Brussels AstraZeneca doses produced at two factories in the UK.

On Friday, the European Medicines Agency approved the Halix production site in the Netherlands that makes the AstraZeneca vaccine and a facility in Marburg in Germany producing BioNTech/Pfizer shots.

The EUs clearing of the vaccine site comes as the union is banking on it boosting deliveries in the second quarter and accelerate the slow pace of inoculations in the bloc.

Europes troubled vaccine rollout has led to a quarrel with Britain, which has imported 21 million doses made in the EU, according to an EU official. Britain says it did a better job negotiating with manufacturers and arranging supply chains.

The EU says that Britain should share more, notably to help make up the shortfall in contracted deliveries of AstraZeneca shots.

Brussels and London sought to cool tensions on Wednesday, declaring they were working to create a win-win situation and expand vaccine supply for all our citizens.

Reporting by Akriti Sharma and Aakriti Bhalla in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Sabine Siebold and Francesco Guarascio in Brussels; Editing by Shri Navaratnam and Louise Heavens

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Britain nearing vaccine deal with European Union - The Times - Reuters

Perry Andersons third essay on the European project, The Breakaway, traces the history of the UKs involvement, from non-participant to rejected supplicant to member for 47 years and then to fractious departure.

The UK was an uninterested spectator as six European states formed the European Coal and Steel Community, the 1950s ancestor of the European Union. Neither was it involved when the Treaty of Rome in 1957 created the European Economic Community (EEC), superseding the Coal and Steel Community.

Later, national economic decline and foreign policy upheavals such as the Suez crisis and decolonisation led the two prime ministers named Harold Macmillan and Wilson to each seek membership of the Common Market, the European free-trade zone. The French president, Charles de Gaulle, vetoed both bids. Only when Georges Pompidou succeeded de Gaulle did a Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, manage to break the logjam, joining the six founding member states in the EEC alongside Denmark and Ireland in 1973.

Forty or so of Heaths own MPs opposed joining, but a band of 69 pro-European MPs within the otherwise hostile parliamentary Labour Party outnumbered them, giving Heath a majority of 17 for passage of the European Communities Bill in 1972. Perhaps the narrowness of that margin dissuaded him from fulfilling his pledge not to join the EEC without the full-hearted consent of the British people. He rejected the idea of a referendum implied in that formulation and avoided mentioning the inescapable fact that the UK had sacrificed a degree of sovereignty in conceding the supremacy of European law a condition of EEC membership.

It was Wilson, returned to power, who says Anderson went through the motions of renegotiating the terms secured by Heath and then in 1975 mounted a referendum. On a turnout of 64%, the majority in favour of Wilsons deal was more than 2:1.

When Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 general election, she launched a campaign to cut the UKs disproportionate contribution to the EEC budget, and managed to recoup two-thirds. The Single European Act of 1987, a major revision of the Treaty of Rome, carried her personal stamp, having been steered through by her nominated commissioner. The countrys position in Europe seemed both distinctive and secure.

However, Thatcher having broken with her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, over his attempts to make sterling shadow the EECs Exchange Rate Mechanism was determined to resist the drive within Brussels and Frankfurt for the mechanism to be upgraded to a full-blown single currency. This opposition forced the resignation of her foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, who in turn lit the fuse that led to her own departure from Downing Street.

Her preferred candidate, John Major, won the succession and negotiated a British opt-out from the euro. But even in doing so, and to the dismay of many of his backbenchers, he signed up to the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, which created the European Union. The anti-Maastricht Tories, seeing the Danes reject the treaty in a referendum, called for just such a vote at home supported, as it happens, by the Liberal Democrats. Majors position was fatally undermined when the UK was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism after a run on the pound on Black Wednesday later in 1992.

Under intense pressure from Brussels, Denmark held a second referendum, overturning the first. Major finally persuaded the British parliament to ratify Maastricht even so, but his authority over his own party was broken, and the humiliating exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism had so tarnished the Tory brand that Tony Blair comfortably won the 1997 election.

Majors three successors as Tory leader, all opponents of Maastricht, all trailed behind Blair in voter preference. Instead, Blairs most formidable opponent proved to be his chancellor, Gordon Brown, whose dogged resistance thwarted all the prime ministers designs to join the single currency.

What Brown had not seen coming when in due course he himself became prime minister in 2007 was the financial crisis the following year. He was duly dislodged in 2010, with the first pro-Europe leader of the Conservatives since Major David Cameron heading the largest party within a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the most ardent pro-Europeans in Parliament.

However, this victory was shadowed by the previous years European elections, where the upstart UK Independence Party beat Labour into second place. Pressure from UKIPs electoral successes and from his own malcontents on the back benches was generating a momentum that Cameron thought he could control, but could not.

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Why the UK's system of government is vastly superior to the European Union - Open Democracy

The supreme court of the European Union has been drawn into a German battle over whether Facebooks broad collection of user data is in breach of competition rules, in a landmark challenge threatening the viability of the technology giants business model.

The decision will be closely watched on both sides of the Atlantic amid a global effort to regulate Big Tech that has picked up speed over the past year.

The case involving the German competition regulator, the Bundeskartellamt, represents a unique nexus between privacy and competition laws. The regulator has effectively used data protection regulations as a method of challenging Facebooks market power.

The Higher Regional Court in Dsseldorf said on Wednesday that it would ask the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) to issue an opinion on whether the competition regulator was right to determine that Facebook FB, +1.54% was in breach of the EUs data protection rules, called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The court in Dsseldorf said it could only issue a decision on the fate of Facebooks broad collection of user data after the ECJ weighs in, effectively putting a hold on a verdict until the Luxembourg-based court has its say.

Essential reading: Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon could face multibillion-dollar fines under new EU tech regulations

The question of whether Facebook is abusing its dominant positionbecause it collects and uses the data of its users in violation of the GDPR can not be decided without referring to the ECJ, said the court, chaired by Prof. Dr. Jrgen Khnen, in a written statement that has been translated.

Wednesdays hearing is just the latest development in a case that stretches back to February 2019, when the Bundeskartellamt ordered Facebook to curb its data collection.

The regulator said at the time that the social media giant abused its market position by harvesting user data across its platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as from third-party services. Facebook was given a year to seek users consent for the company to combine personal data across platforms.

Plus: Google, Facebook undertake appeasement campaigns before Thursday CEO showdown in House

The social media giant appealed, and the Higher Regional Court in Dsseldorf suspended the Bundeskartellamts order. The regulator appealed to the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, a higher body, which then overruled the Dsseldorf courts decision in June 2020 and reinstated the order until the case was settled.

The case returned to Dsseldorf, where the original question of whether the competition regulator was right in deciding that Facebooks collection of user data is anticompetitive moved a step closer to being settled on Wednesday.

One of the reasons the Bundeskartellamts challenge against Facebook is so meaningful is that it threatens one of the pillars of Facebooks business model: selling comprehensive user profiles to advertisers. If the social media giant is unable to combine user data from across its platforms, as well as third parties, its ability to create comprehensive profiles will be hampered.

Today, the Dsseldorf Court has expressed doubts as to the legality of the Bundeskartellamts order and decided to refer questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union, Facebook said in a statement to MarketWatch. We believe that the Bundeskartellamts order also violates European law.

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The fate of Facebook's business model may lie in the hands of the European Union supreme court - MarketWatch